: Exploring

Chlorophilia , a human’s love or attraction to trees and plants (van Biesen), promises an alternative poetic encounter with nature that provokes the question: Can art mediated experiences influence concern and care for flora and the environment? Draw - ing upon art projects—including Melbourne City Council’s Urban Forest Visual Map (2013) in which people emailed individual trees—I examine how exchanges between humans and plants, mediated by art, can result in emergent states that escape the bounds of the predictable. Focussing on practice within an eco-social paradigm, this paper is historically contextualized by Agnes Denes’ and Katie Paterson’s art pro - jects, where cultivation and growth stands as an essential action. Furthermore, my own projects in Moonee Valley, Craigieburn and Melbourne offer insights into this enquiry via direct observation, reflexivity and practice-based research. I argue that encouraging an engagement with nature via haptic and ocular modes of art practice may facilitate a deeper engagement with, and/or increased appreciation for, flora. Creating circumstances within both gallery and public contexts to engage people with plants, as real and imaginary propositions, offers community members of all ages a mediated pathway into participation and conversation. I speculate that these encounters may assist in establishing connections and creating multi-species relationships in both the short and long term.

Chlorophilia, a human's love or attraction to trees and plants (van Biesen), promises an alternative poetic encounter with nature that provokes the question: Can art mediated experiences influence concern and care for flora and the environment?Drawing upon art projects-including Melbourne City Council's Urban Forest Visual Map (2013) in which people emailed individual trees-I examine how exchanges between humans and plants, mediated by art, can result in emergent states that escape the bounds of the predictable.Focussing on practice within an eco-social paradigm, this paper is historically contextualized by Agnes Denes' and Katie Paterson's art projects, where cultivation and growth stands as an essential action.Furthermore, my own projects in Moonee Valley, Craigieburn and Melbourne offer insights into this enquiry via direct observation, reflexivity and practice-based research.I argue that encouraging an engagement with nature via haptic and ocular modes of art practice may facilitate a deeper engagement with, and/or increased appreciation for, flora.Creating circumstances within both gallery and public contexts to engage people with plants, as real and imaginary propositions, offers community members of all ages a mediated pathway into participation and conversation.I speculate that these encounters may assist in establishing connections and creating multi-species relationships in both the short and long term.

Chlorophilia
We are all living in uncertain times, as climatic systems shift on a scale and magnitude that are unprecedented.In the age of the Anthropocene we are experiencing mass extinctions with species and habitat loss proceeding at an exponential rate as the flow-on effect of each loss reverberates through all parts of our interconnected ecosystem.What frameworks might we employ to re-connect with species other than ourselves?How might we reframe our gaze, attitudes and subsequent actions?And, importantly, can art-mediated experiences influence concern and care for flora and the environment?Donna Haraway suggests "making-kin" with other species (102-03).To see human-kind not as separate from but rather in many relationships with others-to achieve manifold connections-requires us to re-examine all our relationships.For example, our relationships with individual pets are intimate affairs whereby we communicate with these companions, and they communicate back.Fantasy writer Philip Pullman bestowed upon each of his human characters from birth a "daemon" animal, a single entity that effectively serves to question our human-animal relations (3). 1   If some of us have kin connections with animals, how many of us have intimate connections with plants?Who could say that they have spoken to a plant recently, hugged a tree in the past week whilst walking, or congratulated a flowering shrub for its wonderful display of inflorescence? "The misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferior to animals" has led to the erroneous conclusion that they are "unworthy of consideration," stated the botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler (82).More than two decades ago, they defined the term "plant blindness" as: (a) the inability to see or notice plants in one's own environment; (b) the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere and in human affairs; (c) the inability to appreciate the aesthetic and unique biological features of the life forms that belong to the Plant Kingdom.... (82) Plants have been devalued, described as lacking a soul (Marder), in deficit, and yet the photosynthesising plants of the world provide life-giving oxygen.In their many forms and guises, plants provide so much for humans: food; building material; habitat; medicine; clothing; and stability to the very ground we walk upon.Plant diversity is huge: a spectrum that ranges from single-celled algae to vast underwater kelp forests to giant angiosperms such as the Mountain Ash, Eucalyptus regnans, crowning the sky hundreds of feet above ground.Plants have been deemed inferior, insensitive and immobile, yet plants both move and grow in a timeframe that is beyond or outside human perception and as a consquence, plants are deemed less-than.Hence the term 'vegetal state'; an apparent state of inaction that belies the complexity of these organisms?Recent writings in the emerging field of plant studies by authors such as Michael Marder, Monica Gagliano, Prudence Gibson and Baylee Brits, and What frameworks might humans employ to re-connect with species other than ourselves?If top-heavy tree-hierarchy systems, such as government and organizational structures, are outmoded, then conceivably roots may offer different perspectives and imaginative structures.Might mycorrhizal networks be a more connected framework to engage with and understand the world, whereby connections grow and extend according to requirements?A necessary shift lies in engaging a framework that deeply considers how actions impact upon the "more-than-human" world (Abram).
Perhaps networks of hyphae bridging tree/root systems is a more apt metaphor for human systems than the tree symbol because it stimulates a reconnection with plants and entities within the more-than-human world, extending nodes and internodes in all directions.Trees communicate and are best grown in communities; forests communicating via the mycorrhizal connections underground-transferring nutrients to similar or different tree species when threatened (Benyus; Wohlleben), and forming rich expansive underground networks-led to the term, the "Wood Wide Web" (Giovannetti et al.).Art practice can also mediate exchanges with plants at individual and collaborative levels, and here I link these interactions with ideas of care and generosity.I have chosen several plant projects as examples of human-plant connections and relations in which to contextualise my own art practice.I have included the City of Melbourne's Urban Forest Visual Map (see: melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au) as an example of how a notification system designed to alert the council to protect and maintain significant trees became a mode for the public to communicate not only their concerns about the trees' physical wellbeing, but also to voice their emotional connections with the trees.Artist Agnes Denes' Wheatfield -A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill  (Manhattan, 1982) is an iconic project that addresses and critiques systems of food security, wealth and distribution.Reiterated in Milan in 2015, Wheatfield engaged community participation at important stages of sowing and seed dispersal.Katie Paterson's Future Library 2014-2114 is a long-term art project whereby plant growth and literary voices merge and transform, to be revealed in 100 years to a future human population.Hers is an intergenerational collaboration of sustainable growth, time and poetics requiring human care and attention for survival and longitudinal outcomes.

Urban Forests
My recent art projects involve plants as collaborators, instigating conversations about land use, colonial attitudes and plant mobilities alongside offering plants as a catalyst for humans to assist in creating multi-species habitats.But firstly, to the City of Melbourne's digital tree love.
The City of Melbourne implemented an Urban Tree Strategy in 2007 (Urban Forest Strategy) after a prolonged drought ("Tree Management").Part of this strategy was to create a map of all the trees in the City of Melbourne and assign them an 'asset identification number'.Through the Urban Forest Visual Map (UFVM) created by OOM Creative and launched in mid-2013, people could email a message to the Urban Forest and Ecology Team (UFET) about specific trees, primarily as a way to report issues such as broken limbs, canopy die-back etc.The public response from people living in or outside Melbourne, and even overseas, resulted in over 4000 emails being sent to the trees with declarations of love, admiration, sadness and even existential crisis (Burin).The following is an example of an email sent to the UFET, by 'A' declaring their love for a tree: This example demonstrates 'F's conversation with the Greenleaf Elm and their familiarity with the tree, however other emails were directed to trees that people had never seen.Some declared that they had never visited Australia, however they liked the idea of 'talking' to a tree.
Unlike being present with a tree in silent communication, this digital form of messaging enabled different appreciations and sensibilities to be revealed, by both the emailer and the UFET.The UFET endeavoured to reply seriously to all tree concerns, as well as selectively responding to some of the outpourings of love and inquisitiveness whilst being playful and sensitive.They have replied to this cultural phenomenon "with care and consideration," Giulina Leslie of the Urban Forest ecology Team expressed to me in an interview and conversation in November 2019 (Leslie).
A criticism of the project is that trees are yet again being anthropomorphised, with humans assuming authority to 'speak' on their behalf.This is an ongoing challenge for the UFET as this digital format was never intended as a tree/human exchange, rather as a notification system to map and protect 'vegetal assets'.The volume of emails received however, suggests that people are keen to connect and are happy to embrace online associations with trees, even if they have never physically met.
The email examples presented here refer to exotic plant species, and were selected primarily as examples of the exchange and declarations of admiration.Native species also received outpourings of love and attention.The tree is personified via an email address, no longer unseen, the Urban Forest Visual Map form enables people to consider trees, select, connect and converse with "vegetal beings" (Irigaray and Marder 90). 2 At work is a suspension of disbelief that allows the tree to respond, like a child receiving a letter from faeries living at the bottom of the garden.Yet this demonstrates both a playful correspondence and the seriousness of addressing the concerns voiced in the email.A digital version of 'hugging a tree', it indirectly raises awareness about tree species within the digital sphere and increases relationships between people and particular trees, thus reducing 'plant blindness'.Tim Ingold suggests that "it is not that things have agency; rather they are actively present in their ASLEC-ANZ Heather Hesterman [Essay] Cultivating Chlorophilia: Exploring connections with nature through co-operative and participatory art projects doing-in their carrying on… and as things carry on together, and answer to one another, they do not so much interact as correspond" (13). 3These emails formed a three-way correspondence, 'with' trees centrally positioned within this human-plant relationship.The Urban Forest Visual Map and subsequent publicity has increased the public's awareness about trees within the City of Melbourne, resulting in both temporary and perhaps more lasting relations.
The City of Melbourne's tree email exchanges presented a digital connection to trees and a private opportunity for the emailer to correspond their thoughts, appreciations and current concerns.Receiving a response from a tree, (even if it is from the UFET), links the emailer momentarily to a notion of wonder.If plants evoke a sense of awe, might art-mediated experiences with plants also be potentially wondrous?
Can participation encouraging humans to attend to and care for 'vegetal-beings' as part of a shared human-plant entwined existence, precipitate tangible undertakings for symbiotic living?(Denes).An important historical artwork, it poignantly references agriculture, labour and food security, whilst interrogating systems of capitalism, equity and power.
Agnes Denes' subsequent iteration of Wheatfield (in Milan in 2015) invited participants to engage in planting and harvesting processes by hand and machine, highlighting mechanized shifts and possible human detachment from plants and food production.By bringing people together through this event to share the processes of sowing and harvesting, Denes offered multiple points of connection for both participants and distant observers.The site transformed barren soil to green field and then golden harvest, giving witness to agricultural cycles in an urban setting.By cultivating Milan's city soil, residents became aware of and involved with cultivation methods through art.The culmination of the project was a Harvest Festival whereby the wheat grains were offered to the public in small bags.The gifting of the wheat offered more than just a physical memento of the event; Denes' artistic concepts were embodied in each grain, jointly sharing the challenges that humans face in considering how to act and care whilst living on a damaged planet (Tsing).The seeds offered new imaginings for a future not yet determined.
Future Library 2014-2114 by artist Katie Paterson is a slow Nordic project whereby a forest will grow for one hundred years assisted by human activity.Paterson and the local community planted one thousand Norwegian spruce trees in Norway in May 2014 that will re-seed and re-grow for the duration of the project.Each year until 2114 a writer will be commissioned to create a manuscript that will be held in trust in a specially designed Silent Room in the New Deichmanske Library in Bjør-vika, Oslo (Paterson).This contemplative room is lined with wood from the forest.The authors' names and the titles of their works will be on display, but none of the manuscripts will be available for reading until their publication in 2114.Trees from the maintained forest will eventually be pulped, creating the paper for the books.
Through intergenerational certificates, the holder in 2114 will be entitled to the full set of 100 books.The growth rings of the trees will echo the writer's timeframe with the addition of one new story per year.
Visitors to the library can sit and read in the Silent Room surrounded by the very scent of the trees whose future seedlings will become the paper to support many words, silent until awakened by a future reader.Authors commissioned in the early part of the project will be long dead, however in the latter stages, authors will share the moment when all the manuscripts are revealed as books.
Margaret Atwood was the first author commissioned, writing her novel Scribbler Moon.Atwood mused: "How strange it is to think of my own voice-silent by then for a long time-suddenly being awakened, after a hundred years.What is the first thing that voice will say, as a not-yet-embodied hand draws it out of its container and opens it to the first page" (Flood).
Future Library projects words into the unknown, a distant time capsule destined for a future audience.And what world awaits them?The books are treated with the attentive care afforded an endangered species; housed where they can be seen, but not read.They are a gift from the past to the future.Both Future Library and Wheatfield are generatively and conceptually potent art projects involving growth and participation.Future Library is a legacy of time, books and words whilst Denes' wheat grains symbolize complexities of food security, capitalism and environmental concerns.Both offer tangible connections to plants through the sowing of seeds or planting of small trees.

Plant practices
My own art practice involves engaging with place, plants and spaces-within galleries and other sites-to reveal what is hidden, un-seen and ignored.Modes of exchange and participation along with gardening as artform encourage ongoing attention.Can these interactions be transformative for both plant and human as co-operative acts?
LOSS/GAIN is an artwork reliant on human participation, conceived whilst walking along the banks of the Ovens River in Bright, Victoria.All around is evidence of historic human intervention: exotic deciduous trees planted in the 1920s and 1930s  LOSS/GAIN references lost landscapes and the removal of Australian Indigenous peoples from traditional lands and culture through colonisation, agriculture and mining on initially small and later industrial scales.This artwork comprises 400 native plants all sited within a square sculptural form, the equivalent dimensions of a single man's mining plot in the 1860s, measuring 28 square feet.The top surface of the stained Victorian plywood form is laser cut with square recesses to hold the individual tube-stock.
Visitors to the exhibition were invited to take a plant as a gift whilst witnessing that the very act of removal both creates and mimics habitat loss.The holes revealed by the plant's removal provide an imaginary aerial or plan view of the disruptions, reflecting processes and policies that extracted people, minerals and vegetation.The square holes of the missing plants reflect black voids, echoing a collective loss.
The audience is invited to complete the artwork by planting the tube stock.This act of revegetation regards the environment as a valuable currency, attempting to address these now visible historical losses through tangible and practical actions such as gardening and tending to plants.
The plants I used were all native species common throughout Victoria and ranged from trees, shrubs, ground covers, grasses and climbers.Signage accompanying the artwork encouraged viewers to participate by taking a plant home.During the exhibitions, (there have been two public viewings in Melbourne) I regularly maintained the plants, by checking the water wicking system, turning the plants regularly to receive natural light, and engaged in conversations with gallery staff and visitors.Some people declined to take a plant, citing that they were living in apartments or had balcony gardens or were unable to accommodate a native species due to size or aspect.However, several small groups of two and three friends took a plant or two to be planted in one of their gardens, collectively deciding what species to select in the process.
Many people took one or two plants and conversations centred around discussing specific species, their forms and optimum conditions required for each plant to thrive.This exchange enabled the receiver to gain information about plant selection, aspect and which plant species might attract insects and birds to domestic gardens, along with maintenance tips and discussions about the artwork.A few people came several times to select plants for their garden, with one visitor 'A' taking approximately ten plants over the course of the exhibition.
We had several conversations about their gardening project and I later discovered that these species were being planted by 'A' in a small guerrilla garden in a Melbourne laneway with public access.'A' told me that this site was near to or was a site of Indigenous atrocities and that the garden was being planted as a memorial, a site of remembering and healing.This act of gardening in the public realm with the intention of generating a small public garden is a testament to how plants can be employed as symbols of meaning for humans through the establishment of small but vital habitats, for 'more-than-human' species.The scale of the garden is inversely proportional to the events it intends to mark, and yet the act of its creation speaks volumes.('A' invited me to see the garden's progress.) Extending ideas of habitat loss, in 2018 the City of Hume (a western suburb of Melbourne) commissioned me to create a series of artworks.My response was Tree Project, which aimed to examine the built and natural environments as sites for investigation and documentation.I walked and drove through new residential housing, commercial and suburban developments as a means of analysing sites and undertaking fieldwork.I watched building crews make structures sitting uncomfortably close to places where there are native grasses, creating transitory or intercessional zones whereby sections of the landscape are in a state of flux.
Farmland  there was once a Banksia forest located to the north of Melbourne.Several remnant pockets of these species are still alive today, pre-dating colonisation, they are closely protected as valuable living seed stock.The idea of creating a massive Banksia forest living and winding itself through to the City of Melbourne is a hauntingly evocative image that I suggest could be made real, by re-prioritising trees over roads.
As a living sculpture, Mobile Forest reflects its environment and suggests a landscape in a process of change.The irony and melancholia inherent in the precarity introduced by climate change is ever present.Perhaps in the future we will need to take our landscape and oxygen supply with us?
Mobile Forest highlights indigenous flora as environmentally and culturally valuable whilst evoking the transitory nature of migration.Acknowledging that many residents have relocated to this area for employment and housing, this artwork deploys meandering as a method.This forest went for walks, relocating from place to place-a memory of a native bushland now replaced by asphalt.As the forest moved throughout suburbia it was a point of engagement with community, as a performative object it is both incongruous and whimsical.Pulled through the streets of Craigieburn, past surveyed sites ready for housing construction, the plants in Mobile Forest shook with the movement, all of us acknowledging the loss of plant species on the cleared blocks.At the completion of the exhibition, the Mobile Forest plants were guerrilla planted, joining other 'vegetal-beings' in the public realm for everyone to enjoy.
Present in both Mobile Forest and LOSS/GAIN are notions of mobility, of native plants being transported and planted in and around Melbourne as additions to existing gardens, adding diversity to habitats.As part of an education and public engagement program associated with Tree Project, local Indigenous educator and Bush Tucker expert, Jo Russel, and I invited people to join us on several walks amongst the trees at Somerton Park, Sunbury, home to many established and culturally significant River Red Gums.Here Jo generously shared her knowledge and expertise about trees and edible plants.We brought along magnifying glasses so that people could see plant structures up close, invited them to taste the Ruby Salt Bush, Enchylaena tomentosa, and to learn how wattle seeds can be processed to eat.We walked and chatted about how trees and plants communicate and the importance of 'vegetal-beings'.At the culmination of the walks, people were invited to assist in creating a graphite rubbing of the girth of a tree.It was a sensory process of intimate involvement with the trees, interconnecting human haptic sensibilities with the texture and bulk of the tree trunk through frottage.Each mark, blemish and bulge was carefully captured, linking human gestures and tree marks together in that moment.To these maps we  added each participant's name, age and the date of the rubbing as a durable record linking tree and human together in the act of drawing.We had an age range of 6 to 77 years participate in walking and mapping, providing a temporal and intergenerational document that was later exhibited.
During one walk, we discovered several large empty plastic bags and without any discussion, the group spontaneously collected bits of rubbish whilst we talked about plants, Indigenous culture, bush food, habitats, gardening, living in Sunbury, politics, school holidays, child-care, plastic-waste, giving up cigarettes, what's good on TV, art materials and practices.This was an intergenerational conversation and a generative transformative act facilitated by art, that resulted in this bush area having a little less rubbish.Encountering 'vegetal-beings' enables humans to correspond 'with' plants, by being 'present' in space rather than seeing ourselves as separate to living and non-living communities or as an 'exceptional' organism.
My proposition is that participation and collaboration in art projects mediated with plants can facilitate or cultivate chlorophilia, and longitudinally without adequate research this claim is speculative.However, in all these projects-by the City of Melbourne, Denes, Paterson and myself-public participation and/or interaction was invited: to notice, to attend, to plant, and to care.Through interdisciplinary thinking that aligns art and ecological practices, human-vegetal relations can be re-formed and re-framed.Cultivating Chlorophilia is an invitation to reduce 'plant-blindness' to form actions of alliance and care with plants.
As a tangible act of a living gift, I offered plants to everyone present at the 2019 Ngā Tūtaki -Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies AAANZ conference.Lyndale Nurseries in Auckland generously supported this idea by donating native New Zealand tube stock.Through the consequent act of planting, each recipient then participated in creating diverse plant habitats and healthy ecosystems, generating possibilities for further acts of engagement, care, and possibly vegetal love.

Fig. 8
Fig. 8 Desert Pea, Swainsona formosa.Photo © Heather Hesterman provide spectacular autumnal displays yet are oddly out of place with the surrounding eucalypts; uneasily undulating terrain reflects mining histories with stones mounded into large piles, river ways altered with storage dams, long water races created and deep cuttings into rock faces facilitating gold extraction.Native trees were felled, soils excavated and sifted with landscapes depleted of grasses and wildflowers.Plant escapees from domestic gardens, such as Ivy, Hedera helix, and Periwinkle, Vinca minor, thrive seemingly unchecked, invading and occupying the riverbanks.Victorian gold mining created an upside-down landscape with valuable topsoil removed and inverted.

Fig. 13
Fig. 13 Green imaginings, 2020.Photo © Heather Hesterman Another example of connection with plants was offered by artist Agnes Denes' Wheatfield -A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, created in downtown Manhattan, New York, in the summer of 1982, and repeated in Milan in 2015.Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in lower Manhattan in May 1982 on a landfill site that was prepared by removing garbage, rocks and then introducing new topsoil.She and her associates tended the wheat field, treating it for diseases and watering it until the wheat was ready to harvest.With views of the Twin Towers overlooking the Statue of Liberty in the background, one thousand pounds of wheat were harvested from this 4.5 billion-dollar city site, forming a powerful image with potent ideas.The bagged wheat was part of the exhibition, The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger, organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987-90) that subsequently travelled to various countries.The documentation is visually arresting: a vegetal-growing confrontation on commercially valuable land utterly transformed by planting a seasonal food crop Photo © Garth Henderson ASLEC-ANZ Heather Hesterman [Essay] Cultivating Chlorophilia: Exploring connections with nature through co-operative and participatory art projectsfirewood they, miraculously, have escaped felling.Located close to waterways, some River Red Gums have been retained as part of open space allocation, some are near reserves of the critically endangered Golden Sun Moth, Synemon plana, or have Indigenous cultural significance.Pinus radiata, and Formply, both utilised in the construction of residential houses, clad externally with acrylic mirror.Emerging above, River Red Gum, Eucalyptus camaldulensis, and Silver Banksia, Banksia marginata, are among other native plants and trees endemic to the City of Hume.As an aside, I have heard that Fig. 11 Heather Hesterman, Tree Project, 2019, community walks and tree mapping.